Month: January 2019

Veeam has always been a company passionate about addressing its customers’ needs. In the latest release of NEW Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4, we continued this trend by meeting an important need for many customers with our NEW native object storage integration: Veeam Cloud Tier. In this blog, we’ll cover the challenges we’re addressing through this new feature — what it is, how it works and the benefits you can take advantage of. You’ll also learn a few points about the uniqueness and innovation built into Veeam Cloud Tier compared to other backup providers. Veeam is changing the data protection game again!

The challenge of data growth and compliance

One thing is certain about data today — it’s growing exponentially. There are many sources on data growth prediction but there seems to be a consensus that the size of the digital universe will double every two years at least.

With this rapid increase of data created by organizations, it’s no surprise that challenges are starting to take hold. Hardware storage costs are skyrocketing, storage capacity planning and management is becoming more difficult, and all the while this resource juggling takes away precious time from core business priorities. Sound familiar? Now, as data begins to reach new highs we’re seeing organizations make a deliberate attempt to manage costs — with many organizations now having a mandate to reduce hardware costs listed as a priority. In addition to the growth, many organizations are having to meet compliance requirements that require they hold onto data for longer and longer periods of time.

What can IT do?

It’s clear there are two major challenges: data growth and longer-term data retention needs. IT departments need to carefully weigh in a few factors when trying to solve these issues, but they should start with two main considerations:

Investigate affordable storage: The most obvious answer to reducing hardware costs is to adopt a more affordable storage. For organizations looking for long-term data retention with cost-efficiency and scalability there is no better place to look than cloud or on-premises based object storage targets. And this is precisely why Veeam customers have requested native object storage integration. When accessibility and quick recovery are still an integral part of a long-term retention strategy, object storage will make the most sense to meet this need.

Take a tiered approach: Choosing a more affordable storage option is half the battle — now you must make sure you are freeing up your local storage in the best, most intelligent way possible. Taking a tiered approach to data management allows you to effectively free up only the storage you want freed up, and tier off only the data you need for longer-term retention. This tiered approach allows an overall better capacity management process. This should ideally be a “set it and forget it” solution that automatically tiers off files to the storage according to your exact retention needs.

Veeam Cloud Tier to the rescue!

Ok, so we’ve covered the challenges and what to look for in a solution to solve the challenges, now let’s look at Veeam’s new feature that meets all these requirements. Veeam Cloud Tier was designed to provide infinite capacity through native integrations with Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, IBM Cloud Object Storage, S3-compatible service providers or on-premises storage offerings. This feature delivers on the promise of instant and automatic tiering directly to object storage to free up local storage. It is also built with innovative attributes that reduce overall storage consumption and lower ingress and egress costs. Let’s check out the benefits

Infinite Capacity

First, it’s important to note that Veeam Cloud Tier is the built-in automatic tiering feature of Veeam’s Scale-out Backup Repository (SoBR) feature. SoBR consists of multiple repositories under one abstracted layer on-premises, that deliver storage efficiencies, enabling the tiered approach to data management I mentioned earlier. What makes Veeam Cloud Tier special is its ability to now make SoBR completely unlimited in terms of its capacity and scale with it now being backed by object storage. Veeam Cloud Tier acts as a capacity tier to automatically offload backups to object storage.

No double charging

One of the most important aspects of Veeam Cloud Tier is its advantage over competitors from a cost perspective. Believe it or not many backup providers will actually “double charge” for the data you store in the cloud. What this means is not only are you paying for the cost of leveraging the cloud provider’s storage but also incurring an additional charge simply for leveraging object storage with their solution. Veeam Cloud Tier is built into our existing Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions and you will never see a “cloud tax” fee from Veeam on your bill!

No vendor lock-in

Veeam has always been known as a storage agnostic vendor. We want our customers to know that if they work with Veeam they can trust that we deliver protection for any application, any data, in any cloud. Veeam Cloud Tier is no different, you will not be locked into a particular storage vendor, in fact we are proud to offer a variety of storage options mentioned above — including both hyper-scale and S3 compatible on-premises and cloud-based service provider options. This feature also opens up the option for service providers to scale-out their IaaS customers to hyper-scale clouds in addition to leveraging their own clouds.

Storage reduction magic

The built-in storage reduction technique is truly what sets Veeam apart from other solutions. We know that customers don’t want to have to send their entire backup to the cloud, or bring it back down for that matter… So, we developed a technique by which the on-premises files remain on-premises as a shell with metadata while the bulk is offloaded to object storage. This drastically reduces the size of the local storage without sacrificing any recoverability of the data. For instance, a 1TB VBK file on local storage could be reduced to a 20MB file.

With this lightweight file format customers incur only minimal cloud-based ingest fees for sending data to the cloud. They can also just as easily retrieve data from the cloud without having to recover the entire backup repository through Veeam’s file-based granular recovery options — minimizing egress charges and increasing productivity.

Here is a view of the Veeam Cloud Tier (Capacity Tier) within the Scale-out Backup Repository:

Take away

It’s clear that massive data growth and compliance requirements continue to take a toll on not only the cost of local storage, but the length of time organizations are required to hold onto data. Object storage is becoming increasingly appealing to many organizations for long-term data retention needs, but leveraging the right solution is imperative to enable a tiered approach to Intelligent Data Management. Veeam Cloud Tier provides a simplified approach, enabling customers to natively tier backup files to a variety of cloud and on-premises object storage targets including Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, IBM Cloud Object Storage and S3-compatible service providers. In addition, Veeam Cloud Tier has many benefits over other solutions including no “cloud tax” and no vendor lock-in.

If you or your customers are not yet leveraging Veeam Availability Suite, now is the absolute perfect time to execute on this tiering strategy to take advantage of the infinite capacity Veeam delivers on object storage.

The cost and efficiency of data

All organizations are experiencing explosive data growth. Data growth continues to accelerate at almost exponential speed and with that comes pain points of organizations trying to manage that growth. More data means more robust applications to handle larger data sets, which also means more infrastructure to handle applications and the data itself. While the cost and management of on-premises storage has come down as hardware and disk technologies improve, organizations still face significant overhead when maintaining their own hardware infrastructure.

Taking that a step further as it relates to backups, when you combine the growth of data together with more strict regulations around data retention, the challenges that come with managing storage platforms for production and backup workloads becomes even more complex. The reality persists that organizations still struggle to achieve the economy of scale both from an operational and cost point of view that makes storing data long term viable.

The rise of Object Storage

Object Storage has fundamentally shifted the storage landscape, mainly due to its popularity in the public cloud space but also because it offers advantages over traditional block and file-based storage systems. Object Storage overcomes many of the limitations of file and block due to its design and fundamental concept of being able to scale out infinitely. Because a large percentage of backup data is considered to be for long-term retention. Object Storage seems to be a perfect fit.

Though the likes of Amazon, Azure and IBM Cloud offer Object Storage, the amount of organizations that have deployed Object Storage to their on-premises environments remains relatively low. The popular trend is to consume cloud-based Object Storage platforms to take advantage of the hyper-scalers own economies of scale which can’t be matched. With the cost of storage at fractions of a cent per GB, organizations desire to consume cloud-based Object Storage has increased and many have been made aware of its benefits.

Introducing Veeam Cloud Tier

With the launch of Update 4 for Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5, we have added Veeam Cloud Tier as a new innovative way to extend backup repositories to the cloud effectively delivering an infinitely scalable Scale-out Backup Repository. By using the new Object Storage Repository as a Capacity Tier Extent as part of the Scale-out Backup Repository, we have fundamentally changed the way in which organizations and our Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partners will think about how they design and architect backup repositories.

By extending the Scale-out Backup Repository to take advantage of Object Storage, whether that be Amazon S3, Azure Blob, IBM Cloud Object Storage or any S3-Compatible platform (hosted or internal), we have enabled this feature to take advantage of cloud storage technologies to tier data blocks and offload them from the local Scale-out Backup Repository Performance Tier extents to Capacity Tier extents which can be configured to consume storage services as shown below.

How is Veeam Cloud Tier different?

The innovative technology we have built into this feature allows for data to be stripped out of Veeam backup files (which are part of a sealed chain) and offloaded as blocks of data to Object Storage leaving a dehydrated Veeam backup file on the local extents with just the metadata remaining in place. This is done based on a policy that is set against the Scale-out Backup Repository that dictates the operational restore window of which local storage is used as the primary landing zone for backup data and processed as a Tiering Job every four hours.

The result is a space saving, smaller footprint on the local storage without sacrificing any of Veeam’s industry-leading recovery operations. This is what truly sets this feature apart and means that even with data residing in the Capacity Tier, you can still perform:

Instant VM Recoveries

Entire computer and disk-level restores

File-level and item-level restores

Direct Restore to Amazon EC2, Azure and Azure Stack

Just stepping back to think about what that mean. With Veeam Cloud Tier you are now able to recover or restore directly from Object Storage without the need for any additional, potentially expensive components. With that, you can start to understand just how innovative a feature Veeam Cloud Tier is!

In addition to that, we have built in further space saving efficiencies in the form of effective source side dedupe where by the same blocks of data are not offloaded to Object Storage, reducing the amount of consumed storage and reducing data transfer times up to the Capacity Tier. We have also added Intelligent Block Recovery that will source data blocks from the local backup files instead of what is tiered to Object Storage resulting in not only faster recovery times, but more importantly, cost savings when pulling data back when using Object Storage services that charge for egress.

Conclusion

For all Veeam customers and partners, both end users and VCSP partners alike, Veeam Cloud Tier represents an important inflection point in the way in which backup repositories are designed and built. No longer are there limitations on how big backup repositories can grow before complications arise from the accelerated growth of data. We have leveraged the power of the cloud with the efficiencies and cost savings of Object Storage platforms to deliver a feature that is unique in the market and we have been able to deliver this in such a way that no industry leading Veeam functionality has been lost.

Source: Cisco
Cisco is raising the bar on multicloud management with expanded capabilities that strengthen Cisco’s ability to be the glue between vendor-specific clouds, tools, APIs, configuration requirements, SLAs, and analytics.Raising the Bar on Multicloud Management

With the announcement today of Cisco HyperFlex 4.0 and the Veeam announcement last week of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 update 4, there is a lot to digest on all the benefits these provide to our joint customers from the core to the edge to the cloud and back again.

There’s magic in the air

It seems it wasn’t that long ago when HyperFlex version 1.0 was released. In just 2.5 years, HyperFlex has gone from inception to a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructures (HCI). This is a testament to their innovation and not being just another hyperconverged infrastructure solution but a true next-generation solution with features and benefits that customers require in today’s frenetic IT world. Veeam is also a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for backup solutions which gives customers added confidence when pairing Cisco and Veeam solutions.

HyperFlex anywhere

HyperFlex’s core values have always been around simplicity, agility and multi-cloud services. HyperFlex 4.0 builds on this with their recognition that customers live in a distributed, multi-site world. To meet customer requirements in this environment, HyperFlex added several key features. HyperFlex can now utilize Cisco Intersight, their cloud-based management platform, to streamline, orchestrate and automate the management and deployment of HyperFlex HCI. HyperFlex and Intersight extend the simplicity and efficiency of HCI from core data centers to the edge with consistent policy enforcement and cloud-powered systems management. Veeam has worked with HyperFlex since its initial release, integrating with HyperFlex native snapshots to backup and replicate data on HyperFlex systems. Veeam can replicate from one HyperFlex cluster to another, backup to a main data center and move backup copy jobs to other sites or the cloud delivering the application and data Availability customers require. Building on the automation and orchestration, Veeam has added orchestration for virtual environments with the addition of intelligent automation in Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 update 4. Veeam delivers proactive monitoring and alerting backed by intelligent automation to alert customers and resolve potential problems before they have operational impact. Together, Veeam and Cisco HyperFlex have greatly simplified the deployment, management and Availability of multi-site distributed environments.

SAP HANA

HyperFlex 4.0 also delivers many new performance and security enhancements specifically for mission-critical business applications like SAP. SAP is critical to customers’ business and it requires an infrastructure that is fast, offers consistent performance and is highly available and protected. Cisco HyperFlex is SAP HANA certified and provides the performance needed for SAP application workloads and databases with simple management, reduced TCO, and cloud-like flexibility. With the latest Veeam release, Veeam is now SAP HANA certified. This is big news for our joint SAP HANA customers. They can utilize Veeam to protect their SAP HANA deployments using native SAP database backup methods, something all SAP administrators prefer, and they will get enhanced backup capabilities like Instant VM Recovery and optimized backups with Veeam’s native HyperFlex snapshot integration. SAP users will be able to leverage Veeam DataLabs to easily deploy SAP test environments and clone SAP databases from Veeam repositories.

Putting it all together, customers can run SAP HANA databases and SAP applications on Cisco HyperFlex, modernizing their production environments with SAP HANA and HyperFlex and protecting it using Veeam’s native HyperFlex snapshots and an SAP-certified plug-in for database backup and restores. Veeam and Cisco have worked together for years with Veeam running on Cisco UCS storage servers, and, at the end of last year, Cisco and Veeam introduced a new joint solution, Veeam Availability on Cisco HyperFlex, an enterprise-grade data protection solution running Veeam services and repository on HyperFlex. Together, we deliver an end-to-end solution; customers can now run their production SAP environments on HyperFlex while keeping it highly available with a modern data protection solution, Veeam running on another Cisco HyperFlex System.

From the edge to the center to the cloud

What Veeam and Cisco are really delivering is simplicity, flexibility and lower costs. HyperFlex 4.0 is introducing smaller 2-node edge clusters for ROBO environments, combined with cloud-based management, making it easier to deploy and manage these systems. Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4 adds Cloud Data Management, Veeam Cloud Mobility and Veeam Cloud Tier, all designed to make it easier for customers to move workloads on premises, to the cloud and back again.

The result is that customers and IT departments today, whether they are large or small, are being challenged to do more with less, while innovating the business and driving measurable impact. Cisco and Veeam continue to work together to deliver solutions that offer simplicity, flexibility and lower TCO that provide the business outcomes our customers require.

All from two industry-leading vendors! Don’t take our word for it, go ask Gartner!

For more information on joint Cisco and Veeam solutions and to receive exclusive announcements, subscribe on our Digital Hub.

Source: Cisco
Cisco Data Center Anywhere delivers security and consistency across the network, with simplicity and management from a single pane of glass, all with a multicloud strategy that starts with your existing data center.The Cisco Data Center Goes Anywhere Your Data Is

Things are changing around here lately! And we are happy to soon be sharing some of the newest changes with the public in a special way. On Tuesday, Jan. 22, you can join Veeam online as we present to the market the next update of Veeam Availability Suite, of which we are very proud.

Over the last few months, Veeam has been diligently working toward a large update for our core products: Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam ONE, Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux. Beyond this milestone, additional related updates are also coming soon for other products, with the first among them being Veeam Availability Console.

On Jan. 22, we will host an online event showcasing some of these accomplishments. Some people are already enjoying these new Veeam capabilities, as we have provided this important update to service providers to prepare for the event that will mark its general availability.

The theme for the technical capabilities of the Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4 release is to bring more cost savings, more cloud flexibility and to have security and compliance for how data is made available.

This update is also special because it coincides with our new Veeam Velocity event. Velocity is an event that, for the first time this year, will have partners in attendance. The primary objective of Velocity is to enable all Veeam employees worldwide throughout the year. Given how partner-focused Veeam is, it only made sense that we also allow our partners of all types to partake in the event in-person. This includes channel partners, alliance partners, service-provider partners, distribution partners, integration partners and more! An even bigger step is that now YOU can also be a part of this experience.

We are putting part of the event online in a streamed portion. I take special pride in this part of the agenda because I and two other technologists, Michael Cade and Anthony Spiteri, will be personally showcasing some of the latest capabilities live to you.

While I can’t quite tell you everything we are going to do at this online event, I can tell you that it will be a well-spent hour or so. Please join us by signing up here to be a part of Veeam Velocity!